Sales and Marketing Performance Blog

Start-up Sales and Marketing Insights and 2010 Priorities

CSO Insights have been publishing sales performance data for technology companies for the past 16 years.

This year is the first time they have broken that data set down to include a survey of Start-up sales and marketing performance.  In their 2010 Sales Performance Optimization Survey, a total of 182 startup sales leaders completed the comprehensive survey of all aspects of the sales and business development process.

As a consultancy we focus on solving marketing and sales problems in both start-ups and in established companies. Established firms trying to sell innovative technology to early adopters, have similar problems to startups, except for the cash-flow constraints.

This survey of 182 start-ups of which 60% were based in the USA highlights a number of issues of which we have first-hand experience. We believe the following data are interesting and worthy of discussion.

• Only 50% of start-up sales people made their quota last year (there is no difference in startup results vs rest, 2009 was the toughest year on record to be selling).
• Sales reps spent only 40% of their time selling on the phone or in person.
• 49% of leads were generated by sales reps themselves, only 25% by marketing, the remainder from partners, referrals, press etc.
• Nearly 70% of respondents felt that the quantity and quality of leads generated by marketing needed to improve.
• 66% of respondents believe their Website needs improvement to effectively engaging prospects.
• Only 42% of deals that were forecast closed, with 30% lost and 27% ending in no decision.
  

The top priority Sales Effectiveness Initiatives for Start-up Chief Sales Officers in 2010 are;-

1. Revise lead generation
2. Analyze Customer Buy Process
3. More closely align sales and marketing
4. Revise sales process
5. Revise channel strategy
6. Improve Rep access to information

The data is comprehensive and in this first article on the Startup results, I have chosen to comment on a couple of high pay off areas.

After reading Steve Blanks "The Four Steps to The Epiphany" and having joined the Lean Startup Circle in LinkedIn, I have to assume that many startups in the World are suffering because they have not implemented the Customer Development disciplines as prescribed in this methodology.

So assuming that you are running a startup, you have a sales team, your product is selling in the market and want to move the needle on sales and marketing performance, what are the highest payoff activities and what order should they be undertaken?

1. Go back a paragraph and order and read Steve Blank's book and join the Lean Startup Circle on LinkedIn.

2.  Align Sales and Marketing Messaging: this rigorous process will create knowledge that will help with;-

• focusing your scant sales and marketing resources on target buyers with highest propensity to need your products,
  
• creating clarity in your Website message to drive Inbound Marketing activities to generate higher quality and quantity of leads,
• creating Buyer Relevant Messaging Templates for clarity in collateral, presentations and in sales conversations for direct and channels sales teams around how the products/services are used to create value (this will really help your channel sell your product)
  

3. Implement an Inbound Marketing Sequence of Events to get found on the Internet, convert visitors into leads, nurture interested prospects, build community via social networks and create mind-share. (If you're still cold-calling give as a call; we can help you convert the time and money you are wasting on this method to a more profitable inbound lead generation method and build mindshare and market presence in the process.)

4. Understand that selling novel technology to early adopters is a Value-created sales method and align your value-chain and selling process around the way early adopters buy.

5. Implement lightweight sales process to qualify in at each step in the customer buying process.

Finally, if you need an experienced guide to mentor you through this process, please contact us to help implement sales and marketing alignment, inbound marketing and behavioural changes.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany and Key to Startup Sales Success

If you were to interview entrepreneurial high-tech CEO's having just sold their companies, or less than successful CEO’s who wound them up, they would provide a great source of information; however their reflections could sound like Tiger Woods at his recent press conference, “Regrets, I’ve had a few….too few...I mean too many to mention".

Underachievement of potential is an opinion many investors will have reached on exiting their high-tech investment. In a conversation with Nic Brisbourne, investment partner at Esprit Capital Ventures in London last week, we concluded that the principal factors causing underachievement are generally people, not product related and the root cause is nearly always poor sales and marketing execution.

In hindsight CEO’s will generally agree that they should have made changes earlier and knowing what they know now, can tell you what they would have done differently.

But what if entrepreneurs had a method or set of best-practices that were proven to create early sales and marketing success in both startups and new product introductions in high-tech companies…would this change the odds of survival and over/underachievement and the value of the company on exit?

I believe it would and am currently reading and absorbing the wisdom and knowledge captured in Steven Gary Blank’s “The Four Steps to the Epiphany”, subtitled "successful strategies for products that win", a book about building successful high-tech companies.

Blank is better known in the US than in Europe, having started 8 companies in CEO or Marketing roles, five of which were IPO’s including names you may remember: E.piphany an enterprise software company, Ardent a Supercomputer company, two semiconductor companies MIPS Computers and Zilog and according to Blank, three very deep craters.

Blank teaches entrepreneurship and Customer Development at UC Berkeley’s Haas Business School, in the Colombia/Berkeley MBA program and at Stanford University at the Graduate School of Engineering.

I love this book!; it’s the best advice I have ever read in one volume for entrepreneurs. So many times through this book I said aloud, “wow if i'd only known this back then…..

Blank’s core thesis in building companies is that there are four discrete stages in the process:

1. Customer Discovery

- is about finding out if there are customers for your idea and if and what they would be willing to pay for it, before you write a line of code. This must be done by leaving the office and talking to real potential customers and of course this removes the guess work in initial product specification - as the spec. is the founders vision and the mimimum working set required to win first customers (or earlyvangelists as Blank calls them). Customer Discovery removes pricing risk because prospects tell you what they would be prepared to pay and it removes the hiring and market failure risk of alternate approaches, including the popular "build it and they will come" start-up strategy.

2. Customer Validation

-creates a repeatable sales and marketing roadmap based on the lessons learned in selling (not giving it away) to the first early customers. These first two steps validate the assumptions in your business model, that a market exists for your product, who your customers will be, the target buyers, establishes pricing, sales process and channels strategy.

3. Customer Creation

-builds on early sales success and after completion of Customer Validation. Blank states that customer creation is dependent on the market entry type which is governed by the nature of the product - is it a disruptive innovation or a me-too. Customer Creation strategies define the four types of start-up

          * Startups entering an existing market
          * Startups that are creating an entirely new market
          * Startups wanting to resegment an existing market as a low cost entrant
          * Startups that want to resegment an existing market as a niche player

4. Company Building

-is where the company transitions from its informal learning and discovery oriented Customer Development team into formal sales, marketing and business development teams to exploit the company's early success. 

If you are an entrepreneur or a sales, marketing or business development leader responsible for introducing new products or services, then this book is a must read. If you click on the book cover above it will take you to Amazon.com where you can order it. If you are interested in the history of Silicon Valley and the birth of the modern venture capital business, you could watch Steve Blank's one hour video on The Secret History of Silicon Valley...its fascinating and a great presentation.

If you are interested in startup best practice, you could join the lean startup circle group on Linkedin.

If you are interested in learning more bout AMC's ideas on building companies and successful product introductions, you could read the following blogs;

1. Value-created Selling - key to winning the early market

2. Differentiation vs Competition and How to Achieve it.

3. Are Marketing People Needed in Selling SaaS Solutions
   
   
4. Recruiting SaaS B2B Channels and Getting Sell Through
   
   
5. Sales Talent is Overrated

 

 

HubSpot Partners Combine to Create Value for Software Start-up

On Monday two weeks ago we received a surprise call from a prospective client who was running a HubSpot trial. We started the trial to gather data to make the business case for an investment in our Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment process, HubSpot, and our HubSpot implementation support.

The call went something like, "We're selling the company on Monday and spinning out a new business, I need your help for the next week to build a new web site, to make it corporate and cool and to address our new target market. Oh, and by the way, we have no time to spend on this as we are tied up with the sale of the business and will be in the USA attending an industry conference next week. Also we want a new 4 page brochure to hand out the conference"

This was an unusual engagement based on a 20 year personal relationship and where the exec. team had to trust us in our decision to build their new website in HubSpot and in our ability to deliver. We knew what we could deliver and what we needed to outsource to get the job done.

• The first call was to Dan Lynton of Lynton Labs, a HubSpot certified partner to deliver a custom CSS 
• Stephanie Tilton from TenTon Marketing helped with professional editing of the brochure.
• Frank Roesner, a professional photographer, who supplied images from a recent corporate shoot to add a personal touch to the Website.
• Kallkwik, a design and print shop in Kensington did a great job with design and layout of the brochure and delivered on the same day.

The Website and brochure were delivered on time and the customer is delighted. But this is just the end of the beginning. What we delivered to the client is far more than just a new website and we will help the client implement the following inbound marketing sequence of events.

We built the Website in HubSpot and created the foundation for an inbound marketing strategy that over time will:

• clearly identify target buyer persona goals, needs and problems and align messaging that matches unique capabilities to buyer needs 
• generate inbound leads through conversion pages where visitors opt-in to give their contact details by subscribing to blogs, news and events, email newsletters and to gain access to Webinars, white-papers and online content.
• to connect, establish and strengthen relationships with prospective customers industry influencers, analysts and thought leaders through social networking and regular communication
• creating fresh content relevant to prospects, customers, partners to build inbound links to improve rankings on Google for favorite keywords
• creating thought leadership in their market through using ideas from David Meerman Scott's best selling book, "The New Rules for Marketing and PR". 
• Build sales one customer at a time and build brand through making each customer successful and using the above tools to spread the news.

The next step is to present the above game-plan to the client and get buy-in to execute.

 

 

Sales & Marketing Performance Tip - Define Your Perfect Prospect

Sales and marketing aligning to define their perfect prospect is one way of improving lead generation and getting more from marketing investments, according to CSO Insights 2010 Sales Performance Optimization Survey of more than 2800 companies.

A key finding in the Sales and Marketing Alignment Analysis Section is that "marketing is still seen as underperforming in providing reps with quality and quantity of leads."

The evidence of this is that only 30% of the 2800 companies surveyed, rated the quality and quantity of leads generated by marketing as meeting or exceeding their expectations. Further evidence of a problem lies in the fact that last year only 38% of reps progressed from an initial meeting to a presentation. This could also be a contributing factor in sales attitude toward marketing lead quality. 2009 was an exceptionally difficult year as the survey showed, however we believe this is an important priority for companies wanting to invest marketing funds more effectively in 2010.

One approach to improving the quality of leads that CSO Insights reports is working, is for sales and marketing to work together to target their perfect prospect. We will share our own perfect prospect criteria and at the same time, would be delighted to hear from anyone who fits our profile.

Industry:

B2B Technology
Segments: Software, Wireless, Internet, Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Applications

Ideal Company Attributes

• Revenue >$US 5Million, <$US 100Million
• >5 sales people, direct or channel
• Have a great product/service
  
• Have funding and cash
• Want to accelerate revenue growth and profitability
• Competent marketing and sales leadership
• Company willing to invest in technology/process for competitive advantage

 Problems the Company wants to Solve

• Not enough leads
• Lack of mind-share/awareness in the market
• Weak pipeline
• Weak messaging
• Sales team underachieving revenue goals
  
• Company under-achieving potential

 Stakeholder to champion a project:

CEO, Owner/Investor, VP Sales and Marketing, VP Marketing (strong)

Prerequisites

• Using CRM
• Using external PR firm, marketing budget >$US 100K
  

 Geographies

UK, Europe, Israel, US East Coast

Our Value Proposition for our Ideal Prospect

1. We help B2B technology companies to create clarity in marketing messaging, making it easy for potential customers to understand the value in using their product/service.
2. We use the messaging to drive lead generation using HubSpot's Inbound Marketing platform and through creating valuable content to create mindshare and build brand over time.
3. We help sales teams increase quota achievement and exploit increased lead-flow through improving selling skills and creating sales tools that align seller and buyer at each transition in the buying process.

http://www.csoinsights.com

2010 CSO Insights Survey: I Want Inbound Leads, Marketing Alignment

CSO Insights * yesterday released their 16th. Sales Performance Optimization Survey of more than 2800 Chief Sales Officers (CSO's) around the World from many different industries.

The top 5 initiatives for Chief Sales Officers in the software business in 2010, with a survey sample of more than 320 respondents, are as follows:-

1. Sales leaders want to revise lead generation
2. They want closer alignment with marketing
3. They plan to revise team structure
   
4. They want a better understanding of the buying process
   
5. They also want to provide better Rep access to information
6. They plan to revise the sales process

How does this top 5 ranking compare with your top 5 priorities for 2010?

What I distill from this chart and what differs from last year is that CSO's are looking for an edge in lead generation and conversion into sales opportunities. Lead generation was on top last year as well, but sales and marketing alignment has moved up from third to second priority. I believe the methods are now clearly defined - such that I can confidently say that the best practices for increasing lead generation and conversion into opportunities are to;

1. Align Sales and Marketing Messaging around the Buyer-Persona to create Buyer-Relevant-Messaging to drive Inbound Marketing campaigns and elevate the standard of sales conversations around how products/services are used to solve buyer issues. This is a first step in an Inbound Marketing - Sequence of Events as it creates buyer-relevance for Inbound Marketing Initiatives.

  2. Implement Inbound Marketing to cost-effectively generate 5-10X leads in the first 6 months of implementation: HubSpot has defined the Inbound Marketing platform and process and they are rapidly gaining momentum with an integrated set of tools, enabling closer cooperation between sales and marketing to orchestrate the lead generation, lead-scoring, lead-nurturing and hand-over process.

3. Sales leaders are recognising the need for inbound sales/sales operations to qualify and respond to inbound inquiries within an hour of visiting the Website. We know from InsideSales.com that a sales lead is 100X more likely to engage in a conversation with a salesperson and become an opportunity if they are contacted within one hour of converting into a lead (by opting-in to providing their contact details in response to an offer). 

4.  Analyzing the customer buying process may not drive inbound leads, but aligning with the way customers buy (determined by product/market maturity and buyer risk tolerance) will reduce cost of sale and help sales managers to decide when to qualify out of deals that are likely to end in a loss or no-decision. 

All purchasing decisions go the though the IMPACT cycle.

In the technology business, being out of alignment with how the customer buys can kill a start-up company before it gets off the ground. Similarly the wrong engagement model can drain profit through over-servicing transactional or value-added buyers.

The Value-Created Selling model adapted from the book, Why Killer Products Don't Sell, by Dominic Rowsell and Ian Gotts, shown in the drawing below is how discontinuous technology is sold to early adopters; how consulting firms sell and how the very best sales people sell consultatively in large coporations to influence new project initiation.

 

The Value- Created Selling Model

5. The sales process is by definition an attempt to introduce order and science into selling cycles to create efficiency and performance metrics and as such will always be a top 5 initiative as products, companies, markets and buyers evolve.

6. Equal 5th place was creating sales knowledge. Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment goes a long way in capturing relevant knowledge and sharing it across customer-facing teams. Buyer-relevant messaging templates integrate the following:

• Industry knowledge about target buyer goals, industry issues and pressure buyers are under
  
• Product-usage knowledge around capabilities relevant to achieving buyer goals/ satisfying needs
• Best-practices diagnostic questions and buyer-vision questions
• Proof points of relevant successes that are accessible and clear
• Narrative summaries of unique capabilities and tools that integrate capabilities into sales calls and formal correspondence

The above concepts are captured and available for instant download in our white paper, "Converting inbound lead generation into better sales performance"

 

* http://www.csoinsights.com

Messaging Alignment is Essential to Inbound Marketing Strategy

Most marketing executives will have lead generation close to the top of their list of goals in 2010; however generating quality sales leads has never been harder, or easier - depending on your strategy.

Careful consideration of a lead generation strategy for 2010 will reduce risk of the following; weak lead flow, poor quality leads, sales blaming marketing, sales doing lead generation, products failing to achieve potential, getting fired, fund-raising challenges, getting sold under-value, and finally running out of cash and corporate death.

How can Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment help?

• By identifying buyer-persona goals, problems, and relevant issues, we can connect buyers to how products are used to create value. Creating remarkable online content that conveys clear messaging around relevant capabilities and appropriate keywords will help you get found on the Internet, engage buyer persona's and increase inbound lead-flow.
• Creating one message and set of sales tools that can be reused across the company by sales and marketing, in the Internet site, blogs, .pdf's, white-papers and in sales conversations; creates clarity, congruence and amplifies the message.
• Capturing proof points or evidence of client success and integrating them into marketing material and sales conversation establishes credibility and believability.

How do you rate your own messaging?

1. How well do you think your messaging connects with buyer needs?
2. Do you have any issues with multiple messages in use across the business - is the sales team all presenting the same message or are they wasting time and effort making up their own presentations?
3. Are your customer success stories all documented and  structured around value-creation capabilities. Are they readily available to your prospects and clearly understood by direct and channel sales teams?
   

The following client-brief discusses how Messaging Alignment and Inbound Marketing strategy work together.

An AMC client announced a new product to supplement existing offerings and wanted to generate leads and market buzz around their product. The company website, like that of many technology companies, was highly product-centric and traditional marketing techniques and PR placements were ineffective; they tried Pay Per Click campaigns, but generated few inbound leads.

We were engaged to help align sales and marketing messaging and improve sales performance.

Step 1 was to conduct a Sales and Marketing Alignment Workshop, where we brainstormed and developed the following messaging structure.

• Buyer persona goals, needs and issues identified,
• Product and company capabilities were matched against buyer goals/needs in Buyer-Relevant Messaging Templates,
• Best-practices diagnostic questions and buyer-vision questions were added to help sales people qualify the buyer and envision using the products,
• Capabilities were extracted from the templates to create a Messaging Architecture to drive Internet and collateral messaging.
  

Step 2 was to integrate the new messaging into the Website and collateral, transforming it from product-centric to customer/problem-centric.

Step 3 HubSpot was recommended for blogging, analytics and creating landing pages. The client began an Inbound Marketing strategy including blogging, webinars, social media integration, email campaigns and lead nurturing.

Step 4 we conducted our Selling in the Internet Age classroom sales training and Performance Support program to train the sales team to use the new messaging and develop consultative selling skills.

As a result of these combined efforts and a tremendous amount of work from the small marketing team, the client is generating hundreds of new high quality leads per month and achieving Google front page rankings for many of their keywords.

In Summary:

 

Marketers wishing to improve lead generation should aim to develop messaging that is buyer-relevant and structured around how products are used to create value. By integrating proof points that support relevant capabilities into the messaging structure, along with solution summaries that capture the nature of the buyers problem, resolution and value; marketers are able to create a maintainable messaging architecture for use across the company and with partners, that adapts with feedback over time and drives Inbound Marketing lead generation strategy.

Please register for our Webinar with HubSpot on Monday 25th January 2010, to learn how to help clients generate more leads & close more sales by offering inbound marketing and sales and marketing alignment services. In this webinar, Marketing and PR agencies will learn how to offer services that help clients:

• 

  Align sales and marketing messaging
• Set lead generation service level agreements for their marketing teams. 
• Establish systems that helps marketing teams increase sales productivity. 
• Establish reporting systems for accountability.
• Establish feedback loops from sales, so marketing can improve impact of marketing activities on revenue growth
  

Clarity Trumps Persuasion and Drives Sales Conversations

Clarity in Internet, marketing and sales messaging is a topic we have been writing about for the past five years as it critical in creating marketing messages for B2B technology companies that resonate with buyers and help them get found on the Internet.

I watched the recent Marketing Experiments Webinar Clarity Trumps Persuasion, with interest as Marketing Experiments showed how small changes in a landing page to make the offer and value clearer, made a 200%+ change in conversion, (if you haven't seen it I recommend it and it can be found here). This is not surprising for a Pay Per Click (PPC) advert for a business to consumer (B2C) product, as creating landing pages that convert is a science in itself and Marketing Experiments are thought-leaders in this space.

The issue of clarity in messaging is critical for both marketers and sellers in the Internet age. Marketing Experiments quote as little as 3 seconds and 7 seconds as the maximum time a visitor will spend on a site if the visitor cannot figure out what the site is about and what's in it for me (WIIFM) to stick around. The questions visitors ask are as follows;

1. Where am I?
2. What can I do here?
3. Why should I do it with you?
   

In the B2B technology market, these questions are extremely important in site design, but they are a part of the larger problem of creating clarity in selling technology products. Clear messaging that aligns both sales and marketing around buyer needs, should be the goal of every company.

How does your Messaging rate?

• How many versions of the truth are circulating in your company? 
• Are sales people making up their own stuff because they cannot decipher the 30,000 foot messages from marketing? 
• How easy is it to figure out how your products/services create value?
• Does your Web-site product-speak (features and benefits) or does it speak to the needs of your customers and how they use your products and how your products create value?

Criteria for Clarity in Messaging for Technology Companies.

1. You can figure out what the company does in less than 5 seconds of landing on the site,
2. Buyer needs/goals/problems are identified,
3. Relevant product capabilities are clear, copy is well written, consistent across blogs, PR and white-papers
   
4. Value-creation and ROI are spelled out on the front page and every subsequent page and call to action,
5. If you use images, they must convey meaning - smiley faces are visual SPAM,
6. Proof-points, case-studies and other evidence criteria are accessible in a mouse-click,
7. Clear and compelling calls to action, (see Marketing Experiments presentation)
8. Technical features and benefits are accessible via a menu for those who need it in product spec. sheets or .pdf's, not on the main pages.
9. No "leading-edge, next-generation, or paradigm-shifting" Gobbledygook words anywhere in copy.  
10. Sales and reseller channels use the same messaging in verbal and written communication with buyers when engaging, qualifying, analyzing, proposing and evaluating products.

The process below is proven to create clarity in messaging, and congruence across the corporation.

To find out more about creating effective Internet Messaging to attract the right sort of visitors, you are invited to attend our Webinar with HubSpot on this subject.

HubSpot Inbound Marketing Performance Review - Year 1

We signed with Hubspot 12 months ago in December 2008 and chose to migrate our Website onto the HubSpot Owner (now Small Business) package, which uses the HubSpot CMS.

We are a specialist marketing consulting business helping companies to align sales and marketing messaging to generate leads & training customer-facing teams to elevate skills for selling in the internet age.

We contacted HubSpot after receiving a strong recommendation from one of our clients VICO Software in Boston, who had been using HubSpot for over a year and were achieiving outstanding results.

Our goals with HubSpot are to generate inbound leads and to grow awareness of our marketing and sales performance offerings in the markets we serve.

The situation prior to HubSpot was that we were doing poorly with Google Adwords; our old CMS had no social media integration, nor the ability for us to change any content. We had been placing articles in the Cambridge Network magazine and averaged about 100 unique visitors per month. We received only one inbound lead in the prior year.

What we learned

1. If you actively use HubSpot as a blogging and social media integration platform, HubSpot works as advertised. See our visitor chart below, showing inbound visits, repeat visits and lead conversion events.

   

2. The charts speak for themselves....you can't fudge the results.
3. We began climbing organic search rankings almost immediately, purely through blogging on a weekly basis.
   
4. We needed a conversion vehicle to capture interested visitors and added our professionally developed white-paper on 30th. September, (see spike on chart) and have been averaging about 12 inbound leads per month and will close our first new clients as a result of these leads in the next month.
5. White-papers create conversion opportunities, but they take time to write and they have to be high quality.
6. We engaged a professional, Stephanie Tilton from TenTon Marketing who did a fantastic job editing our white-paper, asking questions to help us focus our message and formatting it to produce a high quality product.
7. We used an idea from David Meerman-Scott, which was to give part of the white-paper content away with no registration required. The theory is that after spending 10-15 minutes reading part 1, sufficient trust is developed which motivates the visitor to complete a form (and become a lead) in order to download part 2.
8. When we started blogging we were a bit internally focused, but soon learned that people are interested in your ideas first and then make decisions about product/service, so focus blogging on ideas relevant to target buyer buyer-persona, not on your products or services.
   
9. Blogging takes time and in my case requires intellectual effort and must be posted at least weekly; link blogging is quicker and also effective in getting inbound visitors initially, see chart blog subscribers.

What we like about Hubspot is the Integration of keywords, blogging, social media, analytics, SEO, landing pages, keyword grader, link grader and page optimization wizards and CMS on one easy to use platform which gives us tremendous productivity at low cost.

• HubSpot provides quality support and every time we have had a problem have gotten an answer within a couple of minutes.
• HubSpot forums are rich and useful and the 2000+ HubSpot customers provide a tremendous resource base of expertise very willing to help answer questions.
• Finally we love the fact that we can do it ourselves, see and analyze the results, make the changes and watch it grow.
  

We became a HubSpot reseller partner as we believe HubSpot can solve the Inbound lead generation problem while at the same time creating mindshare and thought leadership for a large percentage of our clients who tend to be early stage technology companies or large companies with emerging technology products/services.

What were going to do differently in 2010

1. Set up lead nurturing within HubSpot....this requires thought and mutliple offerings to be effective.
2. Set up multiple conversion events including regular Webinars and an eBook.
3. Stronger and more obvious calls to action.
4. Redesign of the front page and restructure of content around our business focus for 2010 to make it easier to for visitors to understand how we create value.
5. Refine our focus on target markets and messaging, keywords and phrases for target markets
6. Engage our target buyers more actively through social media.

Top 5 Ranked Sales and Marketing Performance Blogs for 2009

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to my friends colleagues and fellow group members.

Here are the 5 top traffic ranked Sales and Marketing Performance Blogs posted on our site in 2009 with links you can click in case you missed them.

1. Differentiation vs Competition and How to Achieve it.
2. Are Marketing People Needed in Selling SaaS Solutions
3. Recruiting SaaS B2B Channels and Getting Sell Through
4. Sales Talent is Overrated
5. Ten Top Ideas for Improving Sales and Marketing Performance in 2010

We wish you health and happiness and success in 2010.

Mark Gibson and Robin Gibson

Ten Top Ideas for Improving Sales and Marketing Performance in 2010

Most sales professionals will be very focused on closing last minute deals in the popular end of year discount-fest enjoyed around this time of year by our customers. Most marketers will be considering how they can improve program performance in 2010 to generate more leads and build mindshare.

It's a bad time to be calling sales and marketing leaders to engage in conversations about improving sales and marketing performance in 2010, but when is a good time?

So instead of calling prospective 2010 clients, I'm posting a blog and sending a link with the top 10 things for sales and marketing leaders to consider in their planning for improved performance in 2010, with a link back to a landing page on our site to register interest in further discussion.

1. Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment: of all the productivity initiatives, this one is the easiest to implement, the lowest cost, with the highest payback as it drives inbound marketing messaging on the Website and elevates the standard of sales conversations with customers.
   
   
2. Territory and Compensation review: are you rewarding your sales team for the behavior you are seeking? Do you have top reps sitting on house accounts and easily making their numbers and potential new stars struggling to learn the business and open new business at the same time, are you under or over paying for performance?
   
   
3. Adopt Inbound Marketing: If your sales team is still cold calling, then your marketing isn't working and your sales team is wasting a lot of time; inbound marketing is a better approach to lead generation. Inbound marketing using HubSpot has potential to significantly outperform cold-calling and traditional telesales performance over 6-12 months and provide an ongoing lead generation annuity. If you enter 2010 with an Inbound Marketing Strategy using HubSpot, you will exit it richer in many ways.
   
   
4. Get into Social Media: in particular, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and if you are in Europe (Germany) XING. These tools will help you research, connect and engage prospects for your products and services.
   
   
5. Implement Lead Nurturing best practices: if you are a thought leader in your market, or an early stage technology company that has a potential for leadership, you need to nurture your leads with a program that educates, informs and engages over the year until they are ready to convert.
   
   
6. Get performance data: so you can benchmark your performance against peers in your industry. The most comprehensive sales performance data I have seen is from CSO Insights and by clicking here to taking this survey you will receive a free copy of the 200+ page 2010 Sales Performance Optimization Survey from more than 1500 companies, when published in January.
   
   
7. Align your selling culture with the way your customers buy: Did you know that early adopters buy differently from mainstream buyers? Failing to engage and win the early market with novel technology is the leading cause of death for start-ups and many killer-products and it's both a sales and marketing problem.
   
   
8. Implement a professional sales certification program for your sales team: We know that sales performance improvement requires deliberate practice of skill and technique, regular role-playing and feedback from experts. A one-off training event is a waste of money without a learning methodology that includes Performance Support, Coaching, collaborative learning and support from experts and sales managers and a certification event to drive behaviour to attain a minimum standard.
   
   
9. Review CRM activity and make changes to formalise your sales process to create pipeline milestones and transparency in the sales process, so that everyone is selling the same way and that buyer and seller are aligned and qualified at each transition in the process. If you haven't seen it yet, take a look at Landslide Technologies, it's the future of CRM - very cool!
   
   
10. Have a great holiday, enjoy your family and friends, get some well earned rest...you all deserve it; 2009 was the toughest year ever in our business.

To discuss any of the above topics and your performance goals for 2010, follow this link to contact Advanced Marketing Concepts Ltd.